How category entry points are fueling brand growth
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. To view the full session recording click here.
Understanding category entry points can have a large effect on your brand's health. But how do you figure out what category entry points are right for your brand?
quantilope's Associate Director of Tracking Solutions, Madita Brandhorst, walked through two frameworks to help researchers find and narrow down the list of category entry points for their brands.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody and welcome to our session, “How category entry points are fueling brand growth odyssey.” I'm Quirk’s Editor, Joe Rydholm. Thanks for joining us wherever you are.
Just a quick reminder that you can use the chat tab if you'd like to interact with other attendees during our discussion. And you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions to the presenter, and we will get to as many as we have time for at the end.
Our session today is presented by quantilope. Madita, take it Away.
Madita Brandhorst
Amazing. Thank you so much, Joe.
Hi everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. I'm super excited to talk to you about how you can leverage category entry points to grow your brand.
First, a little bit about myself. My name is Madita and I'm the associate director of tracking solutions here at quantilope.
What you can see here is me getting my How Brands Grow certificate this summer. In those three to four days, I really dove deeper into the topics of category entry points and mental availability and how you can leverage this framework in order to set your brand up for growth.
At quantilope, I'm really focusing on our tracking solutions. So, a lot on brand health, how you can track that and how you can grow that.
But today I really want to talk about this more fundamental concept of category entry points, which can really improve the ways in which we manage our brands and also do brand health tracking.
Before we dive deeper into category entry points, let's start with a bit of the philosophy behind it.
The foundation of brand growth, according to the marketing science research professor, Byron Sharp, is a function of really two components that he also sometimes calls ‘market-based assets.’
One is physical availability or purchase availability. This describes how easily people can find your brand when they are currently in a purchasing situation.
This can include aspects like being present at the point of sale, having a wide distribution network, being in-stock or having enough outlets. It can also cover aspects like the portfolio that you have, the products that you have available, the SKUs, the different people or needs that you cater to, and that can also cover things like flavor or pack sizes.
Lastly, physical availability or purchase availability also includes how easily people can find your products. For example, if your pack stands out on the shelf. But in today's world, this also spans into the online, right?
So, it's about performance marketing, how high you rank on Google, whether you are visible on Amazon marketplace and how easily you are recommended by generative AI models.
Generative engine optimization, we can also call it GEO, is becoming more and more important and one important aspect of physical availability.
Now, the other component that your brand needs to have in order to grow is called mental availability.
Mental availability describes how easily your brand comes to mind when people think about buying from the category. So, when they're not yet in the store making a purchase, when they're not yet researching something online, but as soon as that kind of motivation arises within them. As soon as we turn from human beings living our everyday lives into a potential consumer or customer.
And that can cover many different things, right? It can cover different occasions, motivations, maybe even feelings that you have that then converts you into a potential category buyer. And this really this kind of how easily you come to people's minds. That is what mental availability describes.
Now, why is mental availability important and what does it have to do with category entry points?
Mental availability increases your brand's chances of being bought.
Think of it as coming to mind more easily as soon as they're available to be turned into a consumer. And the more mental availability a brand has, the more growth your brand can expect to experience.
This was proven time and time again in academic research, but having our fair share of category entry points and mental availability focused research done by now, we were also able to prove this connection between mental availability and business outcomes sales, in this example, in a meta-analysis study that we ran back in 2024 across more than a hundred brands.
Mental market share, that you can see on the x axis, is the key indicator for a brand's mental availability. You can see here that just by this one survey metric, we were able to explain around 70% of the real-world variance in sales outcomes that brand experienced.
So, this is a super strong outcome and also why I'm personally very excited to do research around mental availability. We do have that more instant strong connection to sales outcomes than I may be typically used to when it comes to market research.
Now I already mentioned that mental availability has a lot to do with category entry points. And that is because category entry points, or CEPs, are the building blocks of mental availability.
All of those different needs, occasions or motivations that I mentioned beforehand, everything that makes you think of potentially buying a product or using a service in the future, those things are called category entry points. Again, those are the doors that you walk through as you become a category buyer.
Let's take body wash for an example, a product that probably a lot of us in this room use today. And category entry points for body wash could be something like I want to feel fresh and clean, I want to be nice, but it can also be points in time like before going on a date or after doing sports. So, more kind of time focused components.
And it can also be different motivations, right? Maybe it's to feel confident or maybe I want to take care of myself.
So, category entry points, and I will dive deeper into these with you in a second, but they are really what makes you think about the product category overall.
I know that the focus of today's webinar is brand growth, but first we have to zoom out and really understand the category overall and those category entry points as the most important purchase drivers.
Now, once you want to do category entry point research, you of course have to start somewhere. So often the question I hear is, “How do you get the relevant category entry points for their category?”
Actually, you can start today if you want to. There are a lot of different ways or methods that you can leverage in order to identify category entry points. And I'm pretty sure that most of you have access to at least one of them right this second.
So, first maybe the most traditional route would be to do interviews with category buyers.
Typically, that would be more or less qualitative interviews or a survey using open-ended questions where you simply talk to people about why they last purchased the product, what situation they were in, what motivations they felt. It's really getting that rich consumer feedback.
Of course, this can take a long time and be pretty tedious, but if you've done any jobs-to-be-done research, there's a high likelihood that you already have some category entry points in there.
Next thing is talking to category experts.
Those can be people internally, maybe your colleagues from brand marketing or sales or even customer service that know a lot of what moves category buyers or consumers. And you can just ask them maybe in a workshop format, kind of collectively brainstorming the different needs that people would purchase a product that you sell.
Again, I kind of already mentioned that a lot of us I assume are researchers in this room, so there's likely a good source. If you look at past research, any usage and attitude service that you did. I mentioned jobs-to-be-done. So, you can really dig into those findings again with the lens of category entry points and really come up with that.
Lastly, I mean we're in 2025, of course there is generative AI that can be a great source for understanding category entry points. It's a source that is specifically valid when you're thinking about western cultures that are more the basis for the training of most LLMs that we currently use and have access to.
What we do at quantilope when we work with brands who want to explore their category entry points is usually a combination of all of these approaches.
We typically start with generative AI. We have actually developed an AI based tool called quantilope CEP Generator, that's completely free to use.
So, if you're interested in trying that out, let me know in the Q&A and I can paste the link into the chat later on.
But this is really kind of the first step to get a feeling for your category.
Then we'll take those gen AI CEPs and we'll run a workshop. Bringing together the AI internal and external category experts as well as findings from past research if available.
Then we'll synthesize these findings to get you started with a good list of category entry points that you can use. And really it doesn't matter too much which of these routes you take to take the first step at the category entry points.
I really strongly recommend that you give it a try.
The only tool that you will need in order to try any of these methods or approaches is a framework. And that framework is called the 7Ws framework.
It was introduced by Professor Jenni Romaniuk, who's also part of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. So, kind of the same school of thought that brought us how brands grow back in 2010.
The great thing about the 7Ws framework is that it provides a super clear structure for generating category entry points and you can apply it no matter which of the approaches that I just shared. You choose whether it's an in-depth interview or whether it's prompting AI, the 7Ws will always help you.
There's 7Ws, hence the name, and it stands for Why, When, Where, While, With or For Whom, With or For What, and the cheeky one, how you are feeling when using the category or purchasing from the category.
Again, let's take body wash as an example and think about maybe the benefits that the category satisfies. It could be something simple like just to smell nice.
Let's think about the W of when people are using body wash. Most people will probably take a shower in the morning, some might take a shower in the evening. Depending on what kind of work you're doing, you might want to take one right after work or right before work.
Where are people when they're using body wash? You might think of at home in my shower, but obviously there's other entry points like at the gym.
And when it comes to, while there's a lot of different activities that you could be doing before, while or after. So, maybe you want to use body wash before going on a date.
It also comes down to whom you are buying body wash for, whether it's for yourself or for the whole family and what else you are buying or using together with body wash. In my case, that might be a face mask.
And lastly, and I mentioned that that's kind of the cheeky W, there's also the how feeling, right?
The more emotional drivers, and that could be something like I mentioned before, just feeling fresh, feeling clean, feeling confident or feeling attractive. These are again, just some possible example entry points.
I hope it came across by just asking ourselves these questions, how easily you can get to category entry points. And when you're leveraging the 7Ws framework, it's really super quick and simple to get to them.
What's important from my perspective is that this framework will also help you to think about a category more holistically. Take your brand goggles off and think about just human beings using category products.
And at the same time, it also helps you to go beyond the, I would maybe say more basic purchase drivers like high quality or price. We all know that price and quality are important, but at the same time there are more things that make people buy a product than just price.
Once you have identified your relevant category entry points, that's also when we can start to set up your brand on a growth journey. Because first and foremost, those category entry points will help you to measure your brand's mental availability and your brand's position in the minds of consumers much more holistically. We used to measure brand health and often very single-minded metrics such as a brand awareness question, like ‘which of the following body wash brands have you heard of?’
And that is also what used to be known as brand salience, which was often just an unaided brand awareness question and still pretty single-minded if you think of it, right?
So, this is measuring how well your brand is connected to a certain category. And that might make sense if you're an umbrella brand and operating in a lot of different categories. And you want to understand as Dove if you're more focused on body or body lotion or moisturizer, right? But it doesn't really tell you much more than that.
So, if we now move to the world of category entry points, we're basically testing how many different purchase occasions, motivations and feelings your brand comes to mind for.
In a typical tracking survey, we would track your brand's association with every single CEP that you can see here, and of course many more. And that allows us to go much broader and think much more holistically.
This is also I would say where we get on track for brand growth because we know from scientific marketing research that consumers' relevant brand sets actually change based on their needs.
So, I might have a completely different body wash in mind for going to the gym versus taking care of myself versus something that I want to buy for the whole family versus something that I want to help wake me up in the morning. We're getting much closer to how humans actually make decisions, and this is also helping us manage our brands much more closely to actual purchase drivers. And it just kind of from my perspective, better reflects their reality.
Why am I talking to you about this?
We at quantilope have done a lot of category entry point research in the past years in more than 30 markets around the globe from Northern America to Europe to APEC to South America, even Northern Africa now. We know that this concept of category entry points works across cultures.
Of course, you have to be mindful that you are creating category entry points that are representing the cultures, the markets and different purchase drivers for that category, right? So, toilet cleaner in Japan might be something completely different than in the U.S. but generally coming up with those entry points according to the 7Ws framework, it does work and it does help to more holistically understand brand health.
We've also captured category entry points in more than 130 categories, and we know that it works and that it is strongly connected to business success in a lot of different industries.
This doesn't just include CPG brands like personal care or food. We were able to prove this strong relationship between category entry points and mental availability and business success in categories or industries such as retail, finance, durable services and even B2B. So, this is something that can be applied to many brands out there.
We've also measured this for more than a thousand brands by now, from small challenger brands, newcomers, as well as category leaders. And we were able to provide actionable findings for brand growth for all of them.
Obviously, there's different recommendations depending on what tier you are in, what your market is, how far your market is developed in terms of category penetration. But generally, this approach does offer a plethora of insights for brands of any size.
Overall, we validated more than 2,500 category entry points together with our clients.
Now to the most important part that you are probably all here for, how can you use category entry points in order to grow your brand?
The most important notion and the main goal is to build wider fresher networks, make your brand come to mind in more relevant purchase situations.
And this is again, before people are actually in the store or searching for something online. It's really about getting ahead of competition by connecting your brand to those approaches, occasions and needs as soon as they arise in people's minds.
Of course, you have to start somewhere while it's about building wider fresher networks and eventually connecting your brand to as many different entry points as you can over time. Rome wasn't built in a day. So, you have to start somewhere.
And there's also a process for identifying your priority category entry points as soon as you have your set that is relevant and representative of your category in market.
In this process, kind of based on all the relevant CEPs that you identified, maybe in a workshop, maybe in a validation study like we do, you will then go through a process of elimination. Leveraging what the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls the 3Cs framework in order to eliminate category entry points that are at this moment in time poor choices for your brand. You follow this process until only category entry points with high potential for your brand remain.
The 3Cs framework, what is it about and what category entry points are potentially not the best choice for your brand?
First, you should not focus too much on category entry points that are not common. So, if they're not occurring as frequently or for as many people, the category entry points will not drive as much purchase and sales as others. It's always important to rank your category entry points and to understand what is more relevant to more, because that's more likely to drive sales than what is more niche. And that's one way that you can prioritize your entry points.
The second way that you can prioritize entry points is by removing entry points that are currently not credible for your brand. That means that your brand might have a leg of connections with that entry point. Historically, that cannot be super easily overcome.
We will talk about a mental disadvantage at this point, and it just means for example, the brand Dove might not be or for being for men historically. So you should also remove those.
And lastly, you should remove any entry points that are highly competitive. So basically, entry points or drivers that a lot of different brands are connected to that they are shouting about from the rooftops, you don't want to focus on a message that is super competitive.
As soon as you remove CEPs that are not frequently occurring, that are not credible for your brand, given your legacy and that are not too competitive, you'll be left with a list of potential priority category entry points that all have the potential to grow your brand, because they will allow you to foster and increase your brand's mental network.
Let's quickly look at the 3Cs framework in action.
What you can see here is the typical output of a mental advantage analysis. Green fields mean that a brand's actual performance is higher than expected, and red means that a brand's actual performance is lower than expected.
As you can see, this table is quite crowded, and it might be hard to spot the most promising entry points for brand growth from this one. So, let's boil it down with the framework that I just introduced, focusing on Dove on the left-hand side first.
If we remove all CEPs that are super competitive, so where competitors have an advantage, you can already see that it gets much clearer.
Next, I would recommend that Dove not focus on CEPs that are not credible at this point. So, where there's a red field for Dove, and again, much cleaner, clearer list of potential entry points that would set Dove up for brand growth.
We have things like taking care of myself or taking a bath or a longer shower or during a morning routine.
And now again it comes down to prioritizing based on frequency or potential sales impact, we've ordered the entry points that way. So, the most promising entry points for brand growth for Dove in this example would actually be the two priority CEPs to take care of myself and when taking a bath.
As soon as you've identified those priority CEPs that will help grow your brand, this is really where the fun begins and where you have a million opportunities to turn that theoretical brand growth into actions for your brand.
That can be things like typical marketing activities, from brand positioning to building a brand campaign with a specific key message. It can be using entry points to explore or widen your creator network or select certain influencers. Depending on the entry points, it can also support you in fine tuning your media plan and creative strategy.
But if you want to, and we of course recommend that you do, category entry points can go beyond brand and marketing. They can really inspire and influence other parts of the organization.
And that can be parts like point-of-sale promotions, targeted activations. You can use them to inspire product innovation and R&D or even to explore potential brand collaborations that would help you acquire or reach a new target group. There's a lot of things that you can do.
Before I open up the floor for questions, I want to really share a real-life example from one of our clients who used category entry points in order to set their brand up for growth. That is Planted, but please do already hit the Q&A box so that I can answer a couple of your questions before we log off.
So, Planted is a Swiss based challenger brand in the category of plant-based meat alternatives. And they were relatively new to the category back in the day and wanted to research category entry points in order to understand those key drivers of category usage and kind of find their niche.
I really want to shout out Joanna, their chief marketing officer, because she aimed to execute category entry points across all touchpoints in the consumer and shopper journey.
So, what they did was use category entry points to fine tune their brand positioning that you can see here. This is their new claim, “approved by meat lovers.”
And this was specifically developed after doing category entry point research with us. They used to be more sustainability focused and then really shifted gear focusing much more on taste and being for everyone. They did a whole lot of activation focused around this new claim.
They developed a completely new brand campaign that supported the claim. Focused on specific entry points for barbecuing.
They also included a new testimonial in this campaign who is called Chrigu Stucki and who is a Swiss pro wrestler and a proper meat lover. He's now an ambassador for Planted. So really kind of the personification of the claim “approved by meat lovers.”
Planted went even further. They did a lot of POS activation during the barbecue season and they even featured a new product that they brought to market during the same time focusing on expanding into the barbecue occasion.
So, you can really see that Planted holistically, leverage category entry points to grow their brand from brand positioning, communication and ambassadors to targeted activation and even product development. And what we're seeing for them is super exciting.
Now I'm looking forward to answering a couple of your questions.